Hard Times
‘I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks
dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying. It made me think,
after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do
in it.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic. ‘Nonsense!
Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should
never hear the last of it. After all the trouble that has been taken
with you! After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you
have seen! After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right
side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and
calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that
could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd
way about sparks and ashes! I wish,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a
chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these
mere shadows of facts, ‘yes, I really _do_ wish that I had never had a
family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!’
CHAPTER IX
SISSY’S PROGRESS
SISSY JUPE had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and
Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months
of her probation, to run away. It hailed facts all day long so very
hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled
ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one
restraint.
It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no
arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation,
and went dead against any table of probabilities that any Actuary would
have drawn up from the premises. The girl believed that her father had
not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in
the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she
was.
The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation,
rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis,
that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with
pity. Yet, what was to be done? M’Choakumchild reported that she had a
very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of
the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact
measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates,
unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she
would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process)
immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps
at fourteen-pence halfpenny; that she was as low down, in the school, as
low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of
Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler
three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first
principle of this science?’ the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I
would that they should do unto me.’
Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
statements A to Z; and that Jupe ‘must be kept to it.’ So Jupe was kept
to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.
‘It would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa!’ she said, one night,
when Louisa had endeavoured to make her perplexities for next day
something clearer to her.
‘Do you think so?’
‘I should know so much, Miss Louisa. All that is difficult to me now,
would be so easy then.’
‘You might not be the better for it, Sissy.’
Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, ‘I should not be the worse,
Miss Louisa.’ To which Miss Louisa answered, ‘I don’t know that.’
There had been so little communication between these two—both because
life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery
which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition
relative to Sissy’s past career—that they were still almost strangers.
Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa’s face, was
uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.
‘You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can
ever be,’ Louisa resumed. ‘You are pleasanter to yourself, than _I_ am
to _my_self.’
‘But, if you please, Miss Louisa,’ Sissy pleaded, ‘I am—O so stupid!’
Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser
by-and-by.
‘You don’t know,’ said Sissy, half crying, ‘what a stupid girl I am. All
through school hours I make mistakes. Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild call
me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes. I can’t help
them. They seem to come natural to me.’
‘Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I
suppose, Sissy?’
‘O no!’ she eagerly returned. ‘They know everything.’
‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’
‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance. ‘But to-day, for
instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural
Prosperity.’
‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.
‘Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.
‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her
dry reserve.
‘National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation.
And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a
prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation,
and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’
‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.
‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it
was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or
not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.
But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,’
said Sissy, wiping her eyes.
‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.
‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now. Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he
would try me again. And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and
in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are
starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your
remark on that proportion? And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a
better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were
starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million. And
that was wrong, too.’
‘Of course it was.’
‘Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more. And he said,
Here are the stutterings—’
‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.
‘Yes, Miss Louisa—they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s
another of my mistakes—of accidents upon the sea. And I find (Mr.
M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went
to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or
burnt to death. What is the percentage? And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy
fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest
error; ‘I said it was nothing.’
‘Nothing, Sissy?’
‘Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were
killed. I shall never learn,’ said Sissy. ‘And the worst of all is,
that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I
am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like
it.’
Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head, as it drooped abashed
before her, until it was raised again to glance at her face. Then she
asked:
‘Did your father know so much himself, that he wished you to be well
taught too, Sissy?’
Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that
they were entering on forbidden ground, that Louisa added, ‘No one hears
us; and if any one did, I am sure no harm could be found in such an
innocent question.’
‘No, Miss Louisa,’ answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her
head; ‘father knows very little indeed. It’s as much as he can do to
write; and it’s more than people in general can do to read his writing.
Though it’s plain to _me_.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Father says she was quite a scholar. She died when I was born. She
was;’ Sissy made the terrible communication nervously; ‘she was a
dancer.’
‘Did your father love her?’ Louisa asked these questions with a strong,
wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a
banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.
‘O yes! As dearly as he loves me. Father loved me, first, for her sake.
He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby. We have never been
asunder from that time.’
‘Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?’
‘Only for my good. Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I
do. When he left me for my good—he never would have left me for his
own—I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial. He will not be
happy for a single minute, till he comes back.’
‘Tell me more about him,’ said Louisa, ‘I will never ask you again.
Where did you live?’
‘We travelled about the country, and had no fixed place to live in.
Father’s a;’ Sissy whispered the awful word, ‘a clown.’
‘To make the people laugh?’ said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.
‘Yes. But they wouldn’t laugh sometimes, and then father cried. Lately,
they very often wouldn’t laugh, and he used to come home despairing.
Father’s not like most. Those who didn’t know him as well as I do, and
didn’t love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right.
Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt
them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me. He was far, far timider
than they thought!’
‘And you were his comfort through everything?’
She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face. ‘I hope so, and father
said I was. It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because
he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to
be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal, and be
different from him. I used to read to him to cheer his courage, and he
was very fond of that. They were wrong books—I am never to speak of them
here—but we didn’t know there was any harm in them.’
‘And he liked them?’ said Louisa, with a searching gaze on Sissy all this
time.
‘O very much! They kept him, many times, from what did him real harm.
And often and often of a night, he used to forget all his troubles in
wondering whether the Sultan would let the lady go on with the story, or
would have her head cut off before it was finished.’
‘And your father was always kind? To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.
‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands. ‘Kinder and kinder
than I can tell. He was angry only one night, and that was not to me,
but Merrylegs. Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful fact; ‘is his
performing dog.’
‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.
‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to
jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one
of his tricks. He looked at father, and didn’t do it at once.
Everything of father’s had gone wrong that night, and he hadn’t pleased
the public at all. He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing,
and had no compassion on him. Then he beat the dog, and I was
frightened, and said, “Father, father! Pray don’t hurt the creature who
is so fond of you! O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!” And he stopped,
and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the
dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.’